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In a society where the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the drugs we take come off an assembly line, Harris plies her trade with two hands, a needle and some thread.

She sews "skin suits" for severely burned patients at Toronto's Ross Tilley Burn Centre. The pressure garments control the growth of hypertrophic scars – irregular and exaggerated skin growth that can cause deformities.

Burn patients are missing the dermis layers of skin, which contain a mesh of collagen that applies pressure and stops excess skin from forming. Pressure garments replace the lost dermis, protect the fragile grafts and reduce itching.

"If you get a small cut or a burn, the skin knows how to heal," Harris says. "But in a bad burn, the pressure garment acts like the skin you lost."

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Harris treats patients in the seventh-floor unit and outpatients who come in for checkups. She carries a big, black knapsack containing simple tools: swatches of Lycra in black or beige, a measuring tape, pencils, paper, a sewing kit and a tiny brown plush bear wearing pressure garments she made.

About 50 years ago, the idea for a pressure suit came from an engineer with vascular disease who noticed his regular swims in the pool made his condition better, says Harris. So he hired someone to make him a suit to emulate the pressure of the water, and a new mode of therapy was born.

The pressure garment – from a glove for a burned hand to a full body suit – must be worn 23 hours a day, removed only for bathing and cleaning. Harris usually sees patients one to three months after they have been burned. Most patients wear the suits for 12 to 18 months.

"Skin is totally amazing," she says. "You can't compete with it, but I have to."

Harris, who is in her 40s, is a creative person, a dancer who studied psychology in university. She never imagined she would spend her life working with burn patients. "I didn't choose burns; they chose me," she says.

Raised in New York State, she wanted to immigrate to Canada, and the only way she could two decades ago was to start her own business. She thought about dressmaking and pattern design. Someone handed her a book on customized clothing for the disabled.

"Something clicked inside," she recalls.

When she discovered there was no Canadian company making pressure garments, she and her sister, Susan, began the Recovery Garment Centre 22 years ago. They apprenticed for nearly 100 hours at a California company. Twelve years ago, Harris bought her sister out. "A lot of this is self-taught," she notes. "When I first started, it took three hours to make a glove; now it takes 25 minutes."

Her suits come in two colours, black or tan, and are made from a Lycra-nylon blend. The fabric is sewn using silk thread and a flat-lock stitch to provide a smooth, seamless product that won't irritate the skin.

Most of the sewing occurs at Harris's small shop on Heintzman St. in the Junction district of Toronto. The storefront shop is no more than six metres wide; her neighbours are a car garage and a Tibetan temple. Harris spends her day with employees Ann Vracin and Van Doan, manually drawing patterns on brown drafting paper and stitching the garments on fast sewing machines called sergers.

Human anatomy drawings grace the walls of the workshop, along with a world map dotted with red push-pins. Each pin represents places where the centre's used garments have been donated to burn patients. A corkboard is filled with photos of Harris' many patients. While burn survivors are the majority of her clients, she also treats cancer patients, people with vascular problems or lymphedema, and those who have lost skin in serious car accidents. Harris says she feels blessed to have met such incredible people.

One picture is of Harold Adams, a social worker who 14 years ago suffered burns to nearly 70 per cent of his body while burning brush on his family's farm. Adams wore what he calls a "full-body Roberta suit" after the accident for more than one year. Now, Adams comes to Harris for help with deep vein thrombosis in his left leg.

Adams stopped by the shop early one morning recently so Harris could check on his leg.

Learning how to live in a scarred body with a severe burn can be demoralizing, he says. "People measure you on what they can see on the surface. They can see you as less than. You can get trapped in a place that is really dark."

Support from friends, family and caregivers – including people like Harris – makes all the difference, he says. "It reminded me what was important. I was never cut loose."

Harris becomes emotional when talking about her clients. When she and a burn patient first meet, they form an intimate bond right away because she's the first non-medical person to see their scarred bodies.

"It's important for me to look them in the eye," she says. "I look past the burn. ... I don't think there has ever been a patient – whether they are a murderer, an arsonist or someone who has tried to commit suicide multiple times – where I haven't seen a spark of goodness."

Harris knows this interaction is an important step for her patients' psychological recovery.

"When someone has been through a difficult trauma and you see that spark in the person and you acknowledge it in them, you help them through the process. That is what I feel is part of my purpose working with burns."

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